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Inside a coffeehouse just south of downtown, death penalty opponents gathered Saturday to press their case the old-fashioned way — by putting pens to paper.

The goal for International Death Penalty Abolition Day was to send out 100 letters, mostly to state lawmakers, said Randy Tatel, executive director of the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing. Abolition Day marks the day the state of Michigan abolished capital punishment on March 1, 1847.

Some letters will ask Gov. Phil Bredesen to grant clemency to Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman, convicted in 1987 of stabbing to death a street-level marijuana dealer a year before in Nashville. Some contend that Abdur'Rahman's trial was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct, and that he was abused as a child, two factors that could have spared him a death sentence.

Other letters, Tatel said, will urge lawmakers to place a moratorium on executions and also conduct a ''thorough, independent study of the death penalty system.''

A bill to study the death penalty and place a moratorium on its use was introduced in the General Assembly last session but went nowhere. A Gallup poll taken in May found 72% of Americans favored the death penalty, 25% opposed it and 3% were undecided.

As seven, then nine people arrived to write the letters, Tatel and Charles Strobel talked to reporters about their fight against capital punishment.

Strobel is director of the Campus for Human Development, which offers drug counseling, job services and shelter to the homeless. His mother, Mary Catherine Strobel, a volunteer who worked on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged, was murdered in Nashville in December 1986.

In seminary classes on moral theology, he concluded that capital punishment was wrong, Strobel said. It ''didn't seem reasonable and fair, and I also had a gut feeling against it. For society to kill anyone just seems abhorrent,'' he said.

He said he never dreamed he'd have to examine the issue as personally as he did when his mother was abducted and slain. But, he said, he and his family remained steadfast against capital punishment.

Mary Catherine Strobel's killer, a prison escapee from Michigan named William Scott Day, was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive life terms, for murder, armed robbery and aggravated kidnapping. He said he doesn't know which Tennessee prison houses the man, who won't be paroled.

''I feel society was just with us,'' Strobel said. His family achieved justice without capital punishment, he said, and so has society.

Day ''has the rest of his life to do good,'' Strobel said.